6 – History and Martial Arts

Sho Kosugi returns to home video with a series of training DVDs via Masters Magazine! An expansion on his 1980’s VHS release Master Class, The Art of Hollywood Ninja Action Film Making is a five part ‘course’ on ninja-centric choreography and cinematography straight from Kosugi himself. Disc or download will cost you around $150 but promises priceless insight from a proven master of action from the movie screen to the gaming console.

Whereas Master Class was in a grey area between self-defense instructional and screen fighting demo realms, this new set is targeted more at practical tutorials for those looking for careers on the screen (silver or green) or behind the camera.

Meanwhile, Kosugi’s former director Sam Firstenberg shows up in two new interviews:

I had never even been on Etsy before last Christmas, when a friend who practically lives on there turned me on to some jewelry crafters for Christmas gifts. So while there, I did a quick “ninja” and “shinobi” search and what do you know!

Most of the below vendors sell on eBay and off their own sites as well, but as I found them all on Etsy in one fell swoop it’s there that will serve as a gateway.

Bakezori — Need a custom ninja suit in the Japanese historical tradition? Is that even a question? Well, check out Bakezori — well reviewed by martial artist, historical reinactors and cosplayers alike.

Ninpo Mart — I salute weapon-smiths who offer non-lethal variety training gear, and by non-lethal I mean I won’t kill myself using any of it. Probably. Anyway, this is the first place I’ve ever seen rubber training claws.

Siamurai — “Siam-urai”… see what they did there? Siamese-fusion Tokyo street fashion, a modern version of ancient Japanese dress, or Hammer pants of a less shiny variety? You be the judge. Man, these are so beautiful.

Shinbudo – Know what a $400 wooden sword looks like? I didn’t either until I started poking around at the jaw-dropping wood work and transcendent craft at hand here. Amazing training lumber!!! Make sure to go to their main website for more…

Shinobi Gear — More sharp-pointees in safer rubber for training, including rare, obscure and exotic tools you don’t usually see in the typical dojo.

Ronin Minatures — Great selection of gaming-style 1/32 ninja and samurai figurines, both painted and raw lead. Gorgeous sculpts, and they really did their homework.

Terrible Weapons — Get out your damned credit card right damned now because weapon-smith Jason Blakey is now offering 3D-printer replicas of Lee Van Cleef’s pendant from The Master! I was the first kid on my block with one, be the first on yours…

One staple of martial arts mail order that not only made the transition from the kung-fu 70s to the ninja 80s was the dart board. What started as “Chinese throwing star target boards” quickly transitioned into the profoundly more successful “ninja shuriken target boards.”

“Chinese Throwing Stars” were popularized in Western world by scenes in the Bond film You Only Live Twice and later the Kung-Fu TV series, and were sold by Chinatown junk shops and martial mail order mavens long before the ninja boom. This “dragon design” target board was little more than a cheap dart board sans the wire target frame. Variants of this graphical layout were painted onto 15″ boards and sold by most if not all major suppliers until the early 1980s, when THIS happened:

It might say “Kung-Fu” in the corner, but Asian World of Martial Arts knew damn well who they were selling to in 1982. The traditional dragon design still adorned the opposite side of this new panel, which featured silhouettes of common retail ninja suits, canon “Ninja-To” swords, manji-sais and yes — NINJA THROWING STARS! (And all of these items were available from AWMA, too…)

This had to be one of if not the most ubiquitous items of the 80s craze era. Nerdy teens had them in their bedrooms, every dojo had one on some wall. Luckily for the modern collector, so many were made for so long, they’re relatively easy to find even now. There’s a super cheap vintage boxed one on eBay now in fact, right here!

And yes, there’s even one in the VN office:

Back in the day, we used to joke that when sensei or sifu was around the dojo, the more respectable dragon side was displayed, but if they were gone and the ninja-boom-era inmates were running the asylum it was time to flip it over to the shinobi side.

Knock-offs and variants of the AWMA ninja board were sold by other manufacturers, too:

The thing was with these boards, they absolutely SUCKED as shuriken targets. The pub dart board material was designed for the needle tips of competition darts, not a wedge-shaped, often dull as a butter knife, throwing blade point. Between the material being too dense and the shuriken being too lightweight, they bounced more than they stuck. Heaven forbid you had great aim and hit the rock-hard red center plug, too, as sometimes that sent the projectile 180-degrees back at you. And if you were a super genius throwing ninja stars indoors, the ricochets got painful and even costly real quick.

We used to use multiple layers of corrugated cardboard nailed to pine planks, and threw outside. Even then, those Chinatown stars (with the holes drilled into them for chains to technically make them necklaces in the eyes of the law) rarely stuck anyway. There was better luck to be had with bigger, better designed blunt-ended stuff originally from Japan:

Nowadays, a much better idea all around are these super cheap, but rather effective, rubber shuriken and foam-board sets all over eBay and various online suppliers. Where were these in 1982 when cheap stars were pinging around my bedroom and ricocheting into the insteps of my bare feet?

If only Asian World of Martial Arts would offer this in the 15″ ninja style…

From our friends at Vintage Nunchaku comes a feature on a critical piece of survival equipment that helped us get through the 1980s — The Jivaro Blowgun.

The Jivaro Blowgun: This was serious “ninja stuff.”

First of all you had to be able to find them, they weren’t listed in Black Belt, Inside Kung Fu or any of the other major martial arts magazines. That meant you had to be familiar with magazines such as Solder of Fortune, Warriors or similar titles.

Second, at least in the beginning, you had to be able to build your weapon. You literally got a long piece of aluminum tube, some brown rubber hose, a bunch of spring steel rods and some beads on a string. You boiled the rubber hose until it expanded and you then put those handguards on your blowgun before they shrunk. That done you installed the mouthpiece. As for darts, you stripped a bead off the cord, cut the spring steel to the desired length, heated it in a candle and then inserted it into the bead (if you were smart you followed the cord channel) and it literally melted into the plastic bead which hardened.

It was a lot of work but it was a good system. You cut long darts for hunting and small darts for target practice or applications where a smaller less noticeable dart would be preferred. You could be a ninja without a sword, but there was no way you could be a ninja without a blowgun. This was the epitome of silent and deadly, it was the true signature weapon.

Jivaro blowguns go back at least as far as 1978 (that’s when I ordered my first one from an issue of SOF and were available until the mid 80s. I literally had about a dozen of these in that time. I had six foot ones for long range target use and I made them in lengths from two feet to four and a half feet to have a portable weapon for “missions.” I had some wrapped in black electrical tape for night use and even had a couple done in white athletic tape for winter use when I moved up north.

Around 1984 they started shipping them completely assembled and they switched to a cheap plastic cone dart. Thankfully I had hundreds of beads on a string and lots of spring steel rods because those cone darts were junk. They were too light for any real accuracy. The bead darts on the other hand were amazingly accurate and from a 4.5″ blowgun I could nail lizards on trees from 30 feet away. I could put 12 darts in the same tree from twice that distance in a 6 inch group.

The two piece blowgun seemed like a good idea but the reality is it came apart at the wrong time, rattled no matter how you packed or slung it and the connection seemed to lessen accuracy. I found I could get almost the same results from one half of the two piece blowgun compared to the fully assembled weapon. Nothing beat a full size 6-foot blowgun, but it wasn’t exactly portable.

Sadly the majority of my Jivaro blowguns went to ninja heaven as they were destroyed in training. The only one that remains is a 1983 vintage six foot model that thankfully is in perfect condition…because you never see these come up for sale and the new ones don’t even come close.

As with most things from my younger days, I wish I had bought a couple extras.

— Vintage Nunchaku —

We at Vintage Ninja never had Jivaro blowguns, opting for self-made (and vastly inferior) fare instead. I did have a plastic toy blowgun for suction darts that was actually branded from the American Ninja film, though, if that counts.

While an actual effective blowgun took some work, skill and practice, and some serious lung capacity, making non-functional but convincing movie-prop grade blowguns is much easier. Ours is a decorative bamboo rod from a florists with some twine embellishments. If we did it, anyone can!

We’re delighted to present the first of hopefully many editorial exchanges with the superb VINTAGE NUNCHAKU community — found on Facebook here. This ‘other VN’ is the best fountain of info anywhere on old mail order advertising from the kung-fu craze to the ninja boom, and the collections of now antique weaponry amassed there will drop your jaw. We’re happy to expand their reach beyond Facebook (where page traffic is often limited based on how much admins pay for the right to communicate with their members) and give their research efforts another archive in case the mighty blue F one day goes the way of Friendster and MySpace.

While the main focus of Vintage Nunchaku is the famed “karate sticks” — particularly the legendary stuff offered by Dolan’s Sports — there’s plenty of ninja fare as well. Scroll on through and note how many of the old scans of catalog pages and magazine ads have identical layouts and offerings from one martial arts fad to another, with cosmetic alterations like black paint and “NINJA!” typography being the only difference from one decade to the next.

Let’s start off here with a look at some of the earliest print adverts for Shuriken:

FROM VINTAGE NUNCHAKU — The oldest advertisement for shuriken found to date. Scanned from the December 1967 issue of Black Belt magazine. Factoring for inflation, that set of two would cost about $35.00 today. Wonder if any of these “Albuquerque” shuriken darts even still exist. This advertisement, nor any other from the same company, is not found in any other Black Belt issues from 1967 or 1968 — which would make them that much more rare today.

I’m blown away that not only were shrink being imported into the U.S. in ’67, but that they were referred to as “Ninja Darts” — hell, “Ninja”-anything for that matter. Pre-80s ninja boom we always called them “Chinese Throwing Stars” with only David Carradine tossing around those thick, heavy wheels for reference. But this ad seems to be an aberration.

The below ad from Asian World of Martial Arts ran 10 years later, and despite the super early ninja-like star-chucker illustrated up top, is more indicative of the kung-fu-craze mail order scene:

Again, much of the above would have some sort of black-colored, “NINJA”-stenciled version by 1984 or so.

Now, on to some of the gems of Vintage Nunchaku‘s beyond-enviable collections…

One black, one gold, one silver — a ‘senban’ for any occasion! I can’t believe cases for these once ubiquitous mail-order sets survived the decades. Note the countries of origin, Japan and Korea, an era long before everything was cheap shit made in China.

And then this grail original!!!

Companies are still producing knock-offs of this 80’s boom staple, they’re all over eBay, dirt malls, swap meets and Chinatown smoke shops. And yes, I still think a shrunken belt buckle puts a sharp-pointee way too close to your junk…

OK, if you’ve never scrolled through Vintage Nunchaku, go now! Join the community, posts some pictures of your own old stuff, drool over the loot of others. The experts over there can identify anything you find in the attic, and are always looking to buy, sell and trade!

I mean, man oh man oh man that collection. So much vintage ninja drooling going on here. That FAN!!! And it’s a Kosugi Kick, too.

If an article like this is right up your alley, then you really should be following Vintage Nunchaku on Facebook — a veritable font of knowledge on vintage gear and merch, old magazine ads and mail-order catalogs and more.

I’ll also take this moment to plug another super valuable resource for craze-era material — MA-Mags.com. It’s a huge database of titles, cover scans and publication dates of most every English-language martial arts periodical ever, including tons of 80s ninja goodness.

Do you have a vintage spread like this? Or even modern equivalents inspired by the 80s craze era? We’d love to see some reader submissions of collection photos. Drop a line to unknownpubs@yahoo.com.

A spread of VN’s inventory of mostly stage-quality props and ‘made-safe’ weapons spanning three decades of repurposed merch and tool-bench kit-bashing.

Scored this odd publicity still, which is not in the usual press kits I’ve found from Enter the Ninja. It’s kind of a dingy, soft pic that may have been left on the cutting room floor somewhere.

But while the quality is nothing to write home about, there’s all sorts of prop weapon porn here!

(click the image to expand huge)

While Enter was the movie that introduced the one-weapon-one-kill notion that ruled ninja movies in America for the next decade, it was produced before most of the standard ninja arsenal was being mass produced and sold outside Japan. The “Kosugi sword” would become widely available in a few variants via mail order and martial arts supply stores shortly after, and by Revenge of the Ninja the Canon crews could outfit an entire film from mass market merchandise.

But the Enter arsenals were all custom jobs and modifications, or re-purposed kung-fu weapons, like those wide-horned sais. You get a great look at how crude the swords were here, too…

Enter sparked the ninja boom in the US, but it also cemented some of the BS notions that drive a lot of martial arts purists and ninjutsu historians crazy, too. Black suits were worn in daylight situations and red and white suits were essentially superhero outfits, missing only a big “N” shield on the chests. Fetishized archaic weapons were adopted in modern situations where a silenced pistol would have solved all problems, hardly the utilitarian practice that kept historical ninja alive during the feudal era. And non-ninja weapons like tonfa and nunchaku were used prominently, while nary a weighted chain nor black egg was to be seen.

But… nunchaku sold, and ninja-nunchaku sold even better. The very promise of the weapon made famous by Bruce Lee sold movie tickets as well, so there you go.

And while we’re on the subject, if you’re on Facebook I highly recommend following Vintage Nunchaku — great old ads and photos of an amazing collection abound. I’d kill for a pair of those hallowed Dolan’s Sports swivel-chucks!

There was a period during the 80s ninja craze that the staff of this site were legally too young to buy mail order weapons. We were utterly bitter at the time, but looking back on it now, it was probably a good thing we couldn’t write checks or get money orders from the drugstore in our early teens. The one time we folded cash into tin foil and mailed it off to some shady foreign outfit selling sharp-pointees from the back of Black Belt, we got burned on the deal — nothing ever arrived, no refunds on cash sent via post, no help from anyone at home or at the post office who would have busted us for trying this in the first place. Lesson learned. For all we knew, one of the moms intercepted the package on us, which lead to another fine idea — renting a PO box so we could keep the parents out of the mail order equation. Our local postmaster declined 13-year-old me on that too.

Again, in retrospect… thank you adults!

BUT! No hardware store could prevent you from buying a tile scraper, right? Aubuchon Hardware in downtown Whitinsville, Massachusetts became our impromptu armorers supply depot for a number of years. Wooden dowels and door chains for nunchaku, tent spikes and ice scrapers that could be ground down into all sorts of troublesome devices, they even had bamboo shoots in their little gardening section that could perfectly house the blades from the clam-shucking knives they sold in the next aisle — instant yari!

And that was just a piss-ant mill-town local, what would we have done if we had access to a modern Home Depot???

Why, we could have just hauled off and scored any number of the below ninja-ish goodies:

1.) Gardening Forks

The most legal and least suspicious implement on the list. With some heating up and bending in a vice, and some common clothesline attached, you’ve got a decent enough looking kaginawa climbing or capture line. Of course none of these things are meant to hold your weight, you imbecilic pre-tween ninja dweebs who just fell out of a tree!

2.) Scraper Blades

Wow, these really look like off-the-rack shuriken right? Well, they’ve got the wrong type of edging for a thrown weapon and don’t have the weight to penetrate. Plus, let’s face it, unless your dad owned a plumbing or flooring business and you were well known at the store for apprenticing during the summer, even the dope behind the register at the hardware store knows you’re buying these with deluded dreams of Dudikoff-ness, and you’ll likely be denied the purchase.

3.) Triangular chisels and carving tools

Find a heavy enough solid steel awl, wood gouge or spike chisel and it’s pretty much a bo-shuriken already. We never did though. Despite having a strong tradition in Japanese martial arts and showing up in more historical records, the 80s were all about “ninja stars” and we didn’t really have the literacy of these arguably more effective throwers. With myriad industrial and hobby applications (the above are both repair tools for stringed musical instruments) one could buy these things freely without looking too too much like a mass murderer waiting to happen, too…

4.) Meat and/or Fishing Hooks

Another alternative to kanigawa climbing implements are common meat and fishing hooks. The trick here was to completely bypass the hardware and sporting good stores with their suspicious employees staring at your NINJA t-shirt, and snag rusty old beaters at flea markets as antiques. Y’know, for hanging plants from and crap, like for mom or something. Yeah…

Man, that bottom one looks like something out of Hellraiser or a Lobo comic!

5.) Pole Climbers

Here’s a modern pice of hardware that’s probably better than anything allegedly crafted by shinobi back in the feudal era. These lower leg gauntlets with spikes extending past the arch of the foot are used by electricians and lumberjacks alike. I remember watching a MaBell repair guy scurry up a phone pole like a… like a what… A NINJA!!!… right outside my 8th grade karate school, and it looked cooler than anything in any Canon film!

Now granted, you can’t just buy these at any old shop. We always assumed you had to be some sort of licensed phone repair dude to score such gear, might still be true. Although EVERYTHING is available on eBay nowadays.

6.) Meat Handling Claws!!!

No shit, these are real, and you can get them on Amazon even!!!

Y’know how pulled pork gets pulled? These bad boys right here. Yeah, had these been around and easily available back then, I’d probably just be getting out of the joint now having killed a kid or would still be sporting the scars of my own self-mauling during some spastic play-time night mission.

Fortunately, my weapon-smithing skills were absolutely abysmal, and I never hurt myself or anyone else. To this day I’m better at fashioning stage and screen props, which is what I should have been doing in the 80s. Why don’t I have hours of video footage of home-ninja-movies???

Got any self-fashioned improvised hardware stories from your own misspent youth? We’d LOVE to hear them, and see pics too. Respond below or mail us at unknownpubs-at-yahoo-dot-com!

Oh, and if you’re a parent, keep your kids out of hardware stores. Do the same thing and buy them skateboards, airsoft guns and fireworks instead…

The book, and later film, of the James Bond adventure You Only Live Twice was essentially the West’s introdcution to ninja, and a few widely scattered episodes of American television series like Kung-Fu, Baretta and Quincy notwithstanding, the next major step toward the 80s ninja craze was the mega-hit Shogun mini-series. Bond may have fought alongside ninja, but they never donned the iconic black suits and masks, so for millions Shogun was the intro to the classic ninja look. (see our breakdown of a pivotal episode here)

Both the notion of shinobi as commandos using swords against guns, and the ancient ninja being a ‘cult of assassins’ were planted, and about to sprout in every field of popular media.

Somewhere in the middle of these well-fertilized (pun intended) acres grew a burgeoning crop of serious martial artists studying actual ninjutsu — combat, spiritual and lifestyle traditions long removed from their feudal origins and practical applications, now finding new life in somewhat abstract ways in the modern world. But could they escape the often ludicrous imagery of the pop media ninja flourishing around them?

I came across some old book advertisements in a 1981 issue of Black Belt that reminded of this period.

Note this ad for the mass-market paperback edition of Shogun, which sold in the millions both before and after the landmark TV event, is not from the original publisher Delacorte, but from martial arts publishing/distribution house Ohara Publications. This ad ran in Black Belt, Inside Kung-Fu and ilk, aimed at a martial arts community that was about to get drenched in a ninja tidal wave.

The airing of Shogun was followed by the release of Enter the Ninja in theaters, making Sho Kosugi the face of the cinematic ninja movement. But the martial arts explosion that ran concurrently to the entertainment media craze had a face of its own — Stephen K. Hayes.

The same Ohara company was also running this ad for Hayes’ first book, which followed years of his magazine articles preaching the gospel of ninjutsu’s spiritual enlightenment, tactical thinking and practical self-defense. Legit, serious stuff, right?

Once in a while, though, he’d don a black hood, like a movie ninja, bridging the gap between media and martial traditions. The occasional publicity photo shoot in traditional shinobi coture was smart marketing by Hayes and team. Masaaki Hatsumi himself wasn’t above such fare with his profound publishing career in Japan, so why should the student be any different?

Hatsumi, however, could more safely embrace the popular imagery of ninja because the product on movie screens in mid-1960s Japan was dead serious historical fare (that he himself had consulted on-set in some cases). And while the 60s boom in Japan obviously had its pop entertainment aspects, the 80s boom in the West tended more to the exploitive. It became big business — from turtle toons to mail order weapons. There were dilutions in quality — the movies got cheaper and cheesier and ninja-themed magazines more bloodthirsty.

See the difference between 1981 and 1987 below (and tons more at MA-Mags.com).

Hayes donning a mask and hood put him a “NINJA”-emblazoned headband away from the same visual plane as Richard Harrison in Ninja Terminator. When a legit dojo swam in the same visual waters, training in gear that to the rest of the world was movie costuming, there was always the risk of eroded credibility and unflattering PR. If hooding-up was a necessary evil, which some of these folk balanced better than others, there was a price. It couldn’t have been easy maintaining legitimacy in the midst of such widespread exploitation.

I’ll say this, too… Nobody in the martial arts community has to deal with more public misconception and general pop culture baggage than the practitioner of ninjutsu. If you study kung-fu and it comes up in discussion with laymen, you might get a snicker or a crass Bruce Lee impersonation — “Oh, you mean all that ‘hhhwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’ stuff?” The same happens with ninjutsu and people are assuming you’re some idiot who hides in the trees wearing black pajamas and a suriken belt buckle. They ask to see your blowgun, or to throw a smoke pellet down and disappear. You’re equated with toon turtles, Power Rangers and video game villains in the minds of a lot of these simps. It has to be a tough road, and I respect the hell out of anyone who puts up with it.

I was never a student of ninjutsu, but being a karateka for a couple of years during my early 80s Junior High days, ninja-mania was unavoidable. I never drew a line in the sand between the martial and movie worlds, finding different levels of entertainment in magazines and books dedicated to both camps. Even if it was the hoods that caught my eye, what I always dug more about the Hayes and Hatsumi articles in Black Belt and Ninja was how different the techniques looked. Punches, kicks, takedowns, ready poses — they were distinct from the long-familiar karate and kung-fu.

Maybe that contrast, the simple fact that there was finally something different on both the big screen and in the dojo circuit, was fuel enough for the ninja boom. It was the 1980s, a decade that craved distinction from any previous — punk, New Wave, Nagel prints, fingerless gloves, parachute pants…

Think back to the early 80s. Remember how all of a sudden every mail order company had magazine ads for TONS of ninja merch? How were all these vendors able to pounce so quick on a trend and stock so much product in between releases of Kosugi films and Hayes books?

Well, quite a bit of it was recycled inventory (or new casts from mechanical tooling and designs of previously existing items), altered with a fresh coat of matte-black paint and hastily stenciled NINJA logos. Sais, nunchaku, Chinese-style throwing stars stamped with Bruce Lee’s face — all hold-overs from the kung-fu boom of the 70s — now given new life as “ninja gear.” It didn’t stop at kung-fu stuff either, as modern police batons, farming sickles sold in pairs, “Rambo knives” and even wooden boomerangs were hastily shinobi-fied for the new fad’s fervent market.

The same sort of spike in exploitive face-lifting of old weaponry has been happening again this past 18 months or so, although somewhat less apparent to the martial arts world, as the stuff is largely marketed to a more mainstream audience — zombie fans.

Thank goodness we have all these color-coordinated sharp-pointees available so all the WALKING DEAD cosplayers can save us from the apocalypse!

Take the same machetes, cheap copies of special forces daggers, fantasy and pirate blades inspired by hit movie series of the past decade, and anything else littering Chinatown smoke shops and cruddy swap meets, then just cover the steel with gloss black paint, spatter some red for simulated blood, make the handle or wrapping the most garish neon green you can find, and blammo — instant anti-zombie arsenal! At least half-a-dozen companies have ‘zombie fighter’ offshoot inventories of their usual offerings, and thus a thousand knock-off lines.

Skulls, bio-hazard symbols and grunge fonts have replaced the silhouetted ninja and kanji, but the execution is remarkably similar. Anything can and has been zombified — logic-be-damned — from shuriken, tantos and Naruto-knock-off kunai to survival hatchets, pistol crossbows and BB-guns. Can lime green Thor hammers and Captain America shields with skulls all over them be far behind?

(If any of you find a green Cap shield anywhere, I’m soooo a buyer!)

Plenty of samurai and ninja gear has been re-released in green lately, too. Katana were the first big items out there, a proven commodity courtesy of The Walking Dead. The bio-hazard tsuba are rather inspired, too. Then it gets rather silly, seeing as a lot of ninja weapons are close quarters fare, or small projectile weapons designed to carry poisons. Hardly threats to mindlessly chomping cannibals that can only be stopped by a crushed cranium.

Bayonets with laser-pointers, Rambo knives in zombie couture and shuriken that look more like band logos than viable projectiles are probably not going to get you through the Z-outbreak.

Come to think of it, a lot of ninja skills are rendered moot in a word where Romero-model zombies plague the earth. Quiet movement, evasion, survival skills sure, but disguise, illusion, fear and taking advantage of superstitions, mind-games and whatnot… all pretty useless against the shambling hordes. And best trade that blowgun for a suppressed carbine, too.

But again, this stuff isn’t being produced based on logic or originality. They’re using and re-using what they’ve got on hand from previous crazes, regardless of how sound Max Brooks would find it.

Oh… and zombies aren’t real. There’s that… But it doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to stock up on fun toys!

The overly “extreme” Klingon-like close-quarters implements above lack the penetration or crushing power necessary to do the job, and all those barbs and hooks can just get a shambler tangled up on top of you. But dude… they’re like so metal…On the other hand, narrow stiletto-like swords, tactical spears and elongated trepanning hammers are quite viable in the fictional worlds of Romero and Fulci.And if a ‘zed’ does get ahold of you, a two-way hatchet/hammer combo or elongated stabbing spike with triangular blade are essential hold-out pieces.Zombie taget boards are awesome, especially when sold with a pile of cheap-ass throwing knives! The piece on the right is positively sublime, with its inclusion of the robotic monsters from the vintage Republic serial THE PHANTOM CREEPS.But these take the cake! Life-sized rubber dummies filled with fake blood, and there’s even a SHOCKWAVES-esque Nazi zombie. Hell, I’d throw shuriken at these for fun, neon green or otherwise.

We’re living in future-camp-in-the-making, people, mark my words. Just like the now nostalgic 80s, in 20 or 30 years we’ll look back at all this anti-zombie gear as so dated, so of this period, it’ll be just as kitschy as a ‘ninja’ fingerless glove or Japanese-fusion Nagel print.

Welcome to VINTAGE NINJA -- dedicated to old ninja movies from Japan's 60's boom to the 80s American exploitation craze and beyond, with a ton of vintage toys, comics, and sharp pointy stuff thrown in for good measure.